Bob Kerr: This game requires topping the dumb with the dumber

It can be a wonderful late summer parlor game, played perhaps while sitting on the porch watching fireflies. It can be played in the same spirit as rock ’n’ roll trivia.

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Bob Kerr
Posted Aug. 21, 2013 @ 12:01 am

It can be a wonderful late summer parlor game, played perhaps while sitting on the porch watching fireflies. It can be played in the same spirit as rock ’n’ roll trivia (three Bob Dylan songs recorded by Jimi Hendrix) or a family spelling bee (chrysanthemum).

It’s called “Come Up With A Dumber Idea Than The Tolls On The Sakonnet River Bridge.”

Bring beer.

Now, there will be some long silences on the porch as players ponder what could possibly be dumber than building a spanking new bridge, then using it to punish three communities that are guilty only of continuing their location on an island.

Sure, you could suggest the Curt Schilling underhand curve ball. That would of course be the decision by state officials to turn into little leaguers and give a former pitcher $75 million to play games. But that, while incredibly dumb and shamelessly ignored by those responsible, is a short-term hit. The financial pain will be felt, then eventually left behind.

But the damage from the Sakonnet River Bridge tolls will go on and on. People will avoid going to Portsmouth, Middletown and Newport because of them. And residents of Aquidneck Island will continue to suffer economic setbacks and the indignity of having to pay to go elsewhere.

And as the tolls become more irritating in their taxing intrusion, the creativity of those determined to get around them and on to Fall River or Newport will be worth watching. The impersonal, camera-clicking anonymity of the collection process is an invitation to our rebellious nature. Beating the bridge will become local tradition.

The tolls are punitive, shortsighted and insulting. And this week, as they went into effect, they became a cartoon. Call it “The Dancing Dime.”

Imagine, the 10-cent toll — the paltry, puny pile of pennies required to cross the new bridge. Already, people are flipping coins out their car windows when approaching the bridge in a small but heartfelt form of protest that seems to suggest that state officials take their tolls and put them elsewhere.

The 10-cent toll is only temporary, of course, put in place by one of those mad scrambles of the General Assembly that the General Assembly is known for. The token toll was imposed in order to make it possible to impose more substantial tolls next spring.

Which brings us back to our game on the porch and perhaps another six-pack.

In the early rounds of “Come Up With A Dumber Idea Than The Tolls On The Sakonnet River Bridge,” there were suggestions of really dumb ideas that came close but just didn’t match the bridge tolls in terms of sheer, self-defeating, long-range stupidity.

There was, for example, the idea to name a state appetizer — dumb for sure, but not deep down debilitating dumb.

In this game, it takes the kind of ideas that leave us in stunned surprise by their loopy departure from all things fair and reasoned.

One idea that many competitors consider a legitimate challenger to the bridge tolls for its high level of dumbness is this one: